John Carter Needs A Sequel

John Carter (Taylor Kitch, Lynn Collins): Thumbs Up.

I recall one of my friends saying John Carter was horrible, but he's one of those friends whose negative opinions actually make me want to watch things even more, but it was enough to stop me from watching at the theatre (ok fine, it really had more to do with a lack of other people willing to watch it with me). But I finally picked it up on rental on a Olympic withdrawal night, in search of a decent movie after watching that horrible Bourne movie (the topic of my next post).

Here's what I discovered ::

Taylor Kitch (the titular John Carter) not only ruined Gambit for me in Wolverine, he has to nearly ruin this movie too. Too many times in this movie, he comes off as an unlikable bastard with the charisma of a stone. But despite him and some of the not-so-polished CG, I still enjoyed this movie. It falls smack dab into that otherworld sci-fi zone that I'm fairly particular about, and I give this one decent marks. So the story has been done over and over, but the world is intriguing and the main villains pulling the strings have only begun to sow their seeds of discord in this dual world/existence setup. Which leads me to my next point.

After finishing the movie, I was so psyched to see that it's a planned trilogy ... only to read the next sentence and see 'flop'. What-the-hell? Apparently Disney won't touch this movie with a thousand yard stick because it cost 250M to produce. Sure, it's got some glaring problems but I've seen much worse movies succeed (i.e. Resident Evil). Some furious online researching shows that John Carter flopped because of poor marketing and poor reviews. Again, I don't understand, poor reviews never stopped people from watching movies so why now?

The original story was written 100 years ago and seems to have been the basis for movies like Star Wars of all things - (in fact, for better or for worse, this movie had a real 'Phantom Menace' feel to it). I also see many elements shared in the Matrix, but to be fair, Matrix for all its wonderful glory copied a lot of other sources too. And there's the problem then. This thing is too old to be recognized and so copied that it's successors make it seem like it's copying them.

Well, all I can do is to share my opinion on my tiny blog and contribute to any sort of movement to get a sequel off the ground. Failing that, I might actually have to read a book to get at the remainder of this story. A REAL BOOK. argh. So in ending, go watch this movie! It's really not THAT bad.